Debian. That’s it for everything (servers, Pis, desktops, laptops) with the one exception of Pop OS on my computer with a new Nvidia card that’s not well supported even by Debian testing. It feels like the least hassle possible. Great support from 3rd parties, very stable, no enshittification (like Ubuntu).
As far as I’m concerned the natural state of any computer is to run Debian. Anything else is an aberration.
Debian feels more today like Ubuntu did back in the days before snaps and heavy commercialization. It’s just straightforward and simple to use with common-sense defaults, and getting it to run with whatever DE you want is pretty simple to do.
As far as I’m concerned the natural state of any computer is to run Debian. Anything else is an aberration.
Same here. My only exception is the computer that acts as my personal LLM inference server and has an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 platform, which runs Fedora because running the latest of the latest in apps and libraries really makes a difference there. Each time I log in, I feel like I am on another planet. It is not bad or anything, it just all feels so foreign.
For my main computer, my misgivings with Debian are crusty old packages. Bad enough I deal with those at work. Is this true, or just common misconception?
I have my "server" (strong word for it) set up with Ubuntu Server, which I don't love for the same reason as you said. Very tempted to swap to Debian at some point, don't care much about bleeding edge features there (most containers anyways...).
You can use Debian testing to improve that matter. It’s probably not very different than a recent Ubuntu. I use stable but I don’t do anything too fancy and will reach for a backport if there’s ever any issues.
I'm running Bluefin, an atomic distro based on fedora silverblue. The overwhelming majority of my apps are flatpaks, and those that aren't or the ones that I compile myself are running in a Debian container, so I'm kind of running Debian too? :D
I use Linux Mint, and have for about nine years. It was originally an easy transition from the Windows world, and I've found that it does everything I need.
On the rare occasions I've run into an issue, there is a lot of help available for this operating system and the Linux Mint forums have been welcoming for those of us who aren't technically proficient.
I use Fedora with Gnome. I like Fedora, I don't really like Ubuntu, I use my laptop for both software development and recreation so I generally like it to Just Work™, which Fedora usually gives me!
Same here; my only gripe with Fedora is that the audio enthusiast ecosystem is very scattered across COPRs and getting a full music production environment needs a lot of setup and tinkering.
I ended up setting up Ubuntu in a Distrobox and just exporting shortcuts to everything I need, seems to work fine.
Currently on Bitwig, bridging my non-native VSTs with Yabridge, but mostly using Vital and the built-in plugins. Interface is just a DacMagic XS and a pair of Audio Technica ATH-M20X headphones.
I'm trying to keep it simple and only install what I need (although I already failed on the samples part, my Downloads folder is full of sample pack archives I will probably never fully triage).
NixOS! (and I'm excited to see there may be one or even two more of us in all of Tildes)
It became infinitely easier to work with once LLMs got the point that they could write derivations and flakes for me, but I would still recommend this to nearly no one, and will install it on every computer I own forever 😅
Curious about the LLM aspect of it. I probably am on slightly deeper than most to nixos (commercial codebase, hundreds of instances 10s of kloc supporting nix code). I got my start with the project documentation ~ 3 years ago via the nix pills guide + nixpkgs manual. It seemed really comprehensive at the time and since then we got nix.dev which basically seems to answer 90% of the questions I see on the subreddit complaining about the docs.
Fedora + KDE. It's a good blend of easy to use and new packages (which I care about for a few things I do). Haven't had many issues with it, so I haven't really looked into swapping. I like KDE pretty well, but also used GNOME for a long time and liked it fine.
I have used Ubuntu, Manjaro and Arch in the past. I didn't like snaps (felt slow, maybe I'm wrong) so Ubuntu's insistence pushed me away from it. Manjaro was OK, but it also just felt like secondhand Arch, so I moved to the real deal. Arch I was very happy with, until I had to set up a new computer and thought "no, I don't want to do all the setup again" (this was before archinstall script, that might have changed my mind). But Arch + i3 served me very well, while I was using it.
The only remotely tempting thing I see is Arch-like + dw{m, l}. I like that you can actually read the source, and I don't have to learn some new bespoke configuration to customize it (my main issue with i3; I wanted a tiling WM, but frankly have no patience for learning all the configs). I've set it up on an old laptop. I like it, but I'm not yet willing to put in the effort to customize and daily drive it.
Kubuntu 25. I tried a lot of distros over the last couple years and every one had some weird pain points in what i wanted to do or stuff would take more time to setup than what felt worth it. Pop_OS and Mint were two I tried most recently since this is a gaming machine and those get recommended as "just works" for games, bur neither one was doing it for me. I ended up downloading Kubuntu just because I wanted to try KDE 6. I've run Debian on my home server for a decade so I'll always be biased towards anything built on it. I ended up loving the new plasma desktop in Kubuntu and it has been the easiest distro to just play games on. One command to install the nvidia drivers and pretty much everything just works.
Related, does anyone know why there is so much vitriol towards Ubuntu users in certain communities? I've pretty much never paid attention to linux discussions online. It's crazy how frequently I've asked about stuff in different discords and people suddenly don't want to help if i mention I'm using a Ubuntu distro.
Some people harbor some ill will towards Canonical for the way they've handled a number of things, or ideas that some Linux users don't like that Canonical has tried to make into a thing (snaps, for instance), and I consider myself in that camp (I disabled snaps and dislike some stuff), even as a user of Kubuntu currently. However, whether I used it or not, I'd never turn that ire towards any users and would always be glad to help when people ask.
The Linux community (as with any, but they are quite vocal in Linux) still has its subset of assholes that judge anyone that doesn't use Arch, or whatever. There are a lot of nice people too. But there's certainly an arrogant subset that acts in a very particular elitist way and Canonical and users of its products probably become an easy target for that gross behavior to aim at. They view what they use as superior and balk at the idea of helping someone that uses something "inferior". Lots of overlap with the reply-guy and "just use <thing>" crowd too
I suppose that makes sense. I am also in the camp of hating snap, but I've ignored it for so long I sorta forgot that its the default for a lot of Ubuntu stuff now. I'll take useless package manager I can ignore over a lot of the other issues I've ran into with Linux lol
Dang, that thread predated me ragequitting Windows in 2019. I used OpenSUSE Tumbleweed pretty extensively then until about 2022, when I formatted EndeavorOS as an experiment because I was sick of fighting Discord. Haven't switched back, it works well enough that I've been too lazy to pave over again.
Gave up on using fun distros on my Raspberry Pis, went back to boring Raspbian. It works 100% (tho I now get this weird thing with the ethernet port stopping working randomly, I suspect a hardware issue).
I really want to get roaming home directories going across the 4ish machines in regular use so that each person can customize the bejesus out of their desktop and not be tied to a single machine. But I really don't have time to futz with it at the moment so will probably just keep assigned machines with the kids sharing.
My wife gave Zorin a spin, but we were both irked by their rebranding of many things...which is great for a unified brand for newbies but is *really" confusing after the 4th conversation along the lines of "You can use KDE Connect to control the TV now" followed up with "What's KDE Connect? Is it like Zorin Connect?"
OpenSUSE is like the weird cousin that everyone ignores in the corner, but felt more refined than most other distros once you got the initial codec issues sorted out. Partially because their default is to install all the optional dependencies, so stuff tended to have less "why is that not working." Zypper is hands down one of the best package managers out there.
I don't love Redhat as much as I once did, but it's well-maintained and I can goof off playing almost any games (that don't require DRM I was going to hate in principle anyway) without having to think very hard.
It's not an official Fedora project, it's a derivative of Universal Blue for gaming, which in itself is a derivative of Fedora Atomic, which is an official derivative of Fedora, but the original Universal Blue images were a derivative of Fedora Silverblue (which was Fedora CoreOS for servers with a Gnome desktop environment added), which created Fedora Kinoite as a derivative replacing Gnome with KDE.
It's all wibbly wobbly balls of stuff and turtles all the way down.
I am running Nixos on my work laptop. I like the convenience of just setting up a nix-shell with the necessary dependencies when I tinker with something. It's running hyperland which feels fairly slick. For my home computer I recently just installed Debian. It is just solid. I figured that if I needed to run some software that wasn't in the regular repo I could just as well either run it in a container or flatpak OR just build it from source.
Started out on Ubuntu back in 2007, wanted the GUI for an old laptop. Switched to Debian somewhere around 2012, and haven't looked back. Are some of the packages old as fuck? Yes. But it's also bedrock stable, I think my longest uptime was just over 4 years before I finally updated that kernel. And I know how to use it. I tried Gentoo, Arch, and Pop over the years just to experiment. But Debian forever has me in its clutches, and I'm happy to be in them.
I really like Sway. I really dislike that I basically have to build a DE around it. Really wish that something like "Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager" gets popular so I can just swap my preferred WM into an existing DE.
Pop_OS! 24.04 with KDE. I had worked with COSMIC for a bit, but found some features still missing from the configuration that was causing scaling issues with my monitor setup (2K and 4K). Mainly around optimizing for gaming seemed to favor KDE or GNOME, so I tried KDE first and was happy with it.
Archlinux since like 2010! Mainly I like to be able to control everything about my OS and understand it deeply. I use it for my main laptop and my home server.
All servers run Debian, except firewalls which run OpeBSD, and desktops run Ubuntu which is of course Debian on the inside. I guess I do a lot of embedded stuff on Raspberry Pi OS, which is based on Debian again.
I used to on Slackware back in the day but I’m not about that life anymore.
Arch Linux gang! Sitting pretty firmly in the KDE/Wayland camp since Wayland's become a lot more stable. Planning on playing with some smaller distros at some point on a couple low-spec systems I have around.
Currently main PC is running Kubuntu 24.04 LTS with Cinnamon instead of KDE. Mostly just because I chose it a long time ago, it worked well enough, and now that I've had enough inertia of using it on my main PC for this long, it's going to be annoying to switch if I decide to do so at some point. I am thinking about trying AwesomeWM on it tho
Couple of other machines I have (laptop, low-power living room TV pc) are running MX Linux. I like their way of doing things, their built-in MX tools, and I'm at the point where I think I prefer XFCE as a DE. At some point I might go MX on my main PC too.
I run an OPNSense DIY router, an Unraid server, and a DietPi (very lightweight Debian running on an old Dell micro PC) print server.
I have another "test" machine that I'm currently trying out CachyOS on also
I do still have one Win10 box around and that's simply for music production because there are a lot of annoyances/caveats/etc for my particular setup that makes me avoid Linux for that purpose for now
USE flags let me put less stuff on my system, avoiding things I don't want or need (some dependencies, "features"), instead of apps having every possible feature compiled into them
years of inertia; it's been doing what I ask of it
OpenRC still an option (i.e. not systemd)
For installations on other people's laptops that I don't want to have to maintain too much, I've turned to KDE Neon, which users can relatively easily update themselves.
As of late, I've been running NixOS and Guix System with nongnu packages. The immense learning curve can't be overlooked, but once I got the model down, the strategies for long term maintenance of a system that doesn't match the project leader's vision on other distros became blatantly ridiculous. Sure, oftentimes getting my desired behavior requires shooting blindly in the dark, and I definitely don't use the full capacity of these systems, but I'm setting up an HTPC and haven't felt this optimistic about getting underdocumented daemons upright in a while.
Are you running them together, or are you running two different systems? I have been tempted to switch from NixOS, because even after five years, the configuration language, the home manager vs none vs flakes is driving me up a wall. I don't think anyone can deny that the Nix language is abysmal, and the Guix scheme config looks so clean and well documented.
How is setting up packages that do not exist in the registry? With Nix it's such a pain.
Definitely different systems, though supposedly guix-on-nixos is quite alright(? I don't buy it). I have one system with systemwide home-manager and one with userlevel home-manager, after waiting for a few years for flakes to mature, and installed the Guix system a month or two ago. I haven't been as adventurous with Guix, so unfortunately I haven't had to build my own packages yet, but it does seem similar to Nix's process, speaking based only on docs and hearsay.
I'm basic, so I always just use Ubuntu. Though even at work, it seems like everything is Ubuntu. Personally, it works for my purposes, so I stick with it.
Though I wouldn't mind trying like Pop_OS or Bazzite. I got a laptop or two I could toss em on.
The technical side looked promising, though I have heard mostly negative things about the projects creator nowadays.
Not sure if this is derailing, but I have a pretty similar result in my setup that I cobbled together without too much fuss from Fedora with Niri and DankMaterialShell.
I'm very impressed with how DMS is getting along as a "Desktop Environment for people who don't want a Desktop Environment".
The same setup should also be easy to setup with Arch or Nix instead of Fedora.
Mint. It just works, no bullshit. I run a very lean desktop setup, mainly just a browser/video/music player, no gaming. I come from a Windows world, but always on the NT side of things (NT-2000-7-Mint) I ran windows 7 until way past the bitter end. At that point it was either go to Linux or Windows 10 and I just couldn't do it. Linux Mint it was. I don't want to have to mess around with stuff, I just want it to work and Mint for 3 years now has done that.
Rockin Bluefin Linux. It's Fedora with Gnome but immutable so it just works and stays working. With other distros I was running into issues with nvidia drivers and my Samsung g9 49 inch monitor (it's a problem child).
Bluefin is beautiful and functional. I have Forge tiling manager on there as well.
I'm running origami linux with cosmic de on a laptop and it's also great
Alpine. It's a fairly recent move to there from debian and I'm very much liking the straightforward nature of things, the speed and not having to deal with systemd. For a desktop it's reasonably austere behind the scenes but I have it and kde running on a couple of boxes, including an old surface pro, and it just works.
Debian felt the same when I moved to it sometime around 1999-2000. It doesn't anymore.
The start was red hat 5.2 in 1998 or so but I can't say I stayed there long.
Fwiw my professional life looks more like carpentry than tech.
How is nobara working out for you? I had been using nobara for a few years (also with a Nvidia card) and I started experiencing more and more issues which pushes me to look into other distros.
I was pleasantly surprised with my move to bazzite, all the points of friction I experienced with nobara simply no longer existed.
At the end of the day my gaming time has become so limited that I'm basically only using my steam deck at this point, which runs on steamos.
Been using Arch all round since 2021 and recently jumped to CachyOS on my gaming PC.
Enjoyed all the customizing and fiddling at first but lately there's no major issues and I don't even have to open the terminal much besides a package install or update.
And not the biggest fan of KDE but its the easiest if other people need to use that pc.
For my workstation is either MATE or xfce.
I got Kubuntu on my desktop right now because my Windows 10 broke in a way that I'm not wiling to fix. KDE Plasma is the desktop environment that just works and has everything so I could go on with my activities without interruption.
KDE Plasma is so impressive. It is not nearly as popular as it should.
Fedora with gnome.... I like it so much I shoehorned into my son's laptop as well.
It works flawlessly, it's fast and easy to use.
I used Debian for an year before fedora and I kind of liked it but while I understood it was super stable (and I was for real) I needed something slightly more up to date :)
Arch, of course, though my lineage dates back to Mandrake Linux and then a long stint on old Ubuntu with some Windows side quests along the way. Been running Arch in some fashion since 2016 but only recently started to daily drive it. Oh I also successfully booted Linux From Scratch and then never touched it again.
I like Arch just because it really works well for me. I've built up a knowledge base of common problems I've faced and solutions but I rarely have to touch it lately because things just... work. I've got btrfs and snapper set up so that does give me some ease of mind as well. It's also got a lot of inertia, most commands are muscle memory at this point and I've got about a 95% confidence that if something breaks, I can fairly quickly identify the issue and fix it or workaround it. And I also just like problem solving too, I think I'd be bored with an OS that I didn't have to tinker with.
I primarily use Debian or Alpine for all my servers though. Debian is just really nice and stable for the most part and is like a good Clydesdale. Alpine is tiny and great for SBC projects or anything lightweight - I have a couple containers running Alpine as a base. A surprising amount of power in such a little distro.
Right now only regular Ubuntu on server and desktop. It's mostly worked very well. I don't tinker too much and "just wants things to work", and Ubuntu has worked very good for me there.
First of all ... Debian on all the servers. 'Cuz, duh.
I run Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) on my laptops and workstations. It is Linux Mint w/o the underlying Ubuntu BS and bloat.
This has been my primary OS for 3-4 years now. Prior to that, I mostly ran PopOS, which I did and still do like, mostly, but had a few semi-catastrophic failures on it that have made me gun-shy, and since I switched to LMDE, I like it even better.
PS: If anyone on the Mint team sees this, I'd be all in favor of Mint switching to LMDE as their flagship version...
I was about to say I use Debian for everything except my main computer that runs Arch (only because the tinkering is part of the fun I look for when using my PC), but then I realised that that is as far from the truth as possible:
main computer: Arch
server in the attic: Debian
Raspberry Pi: Raspbian
Extremely old (about 20y) laptop: Tiny Core ()
() I'd really like to find a graphical web browser that can also run on that laptop, but so far no such luck. If anyone has any ideas, shoot!
I usually use Pop! OS and Debian and NetBSD(I know, not Linux), but from time to time I've used Raspbian, Parrotsec, Alpine and Kali for various dedicated purposes.
SteamOS, because it comes pre-installed on the Steam Deck :P
In actuality though, I do use it as my daily driver, for games obviously but also everything else using a dock and desktop mode. I did dual boot Linux (Ubuntu I think) several years back when I was flirting with being a programmer, but this is my first real experience with Linux full-time. It's been great, I do love the Discover store as a convenient way to install most things. The decks immutable OS makes installing non-Discover apps a pain sometimes, but nothing too bad. Overall very happy, runs well, and glad to not have to worry about what crappy thing Microsoft will do next
Mint is my go-to for new installs, because it Just Works so well. Two computers in the house are on it right now. One of them is the living room gaming/media PC, which ran Pop!_OS for a little while but I found the experience to be pretty flaky.
My laptop used to also run Mint, but I switched to Kubuntu at some point. I forget why I did, but Plasma's so nice I've kept it anyway. That one's also got a Kali VM because everything I use ends up with one of those eventually.
The kids' laptop (the one that isn't running ChromeOS) runs... I forget what I put on there actually, something lightweight that a decommissioned Chromebook could live with. I should look into that.
The Pis all run Raspberry Pi OS.
My wife's all Apple products. She'll see the light someday.
At this point, the only computer in my house still on Windows is my work laptop, and that's only because it isn't mine.
Bazzite, based on Fedora. It’s extremely stable, updates are very easy and you can always roll back. Gaming works great. Using Gnome since it gets out of my way, which is nice.
all of my servers are on either Ubuntu server or Debian. My super shitty Chromebook (Toshiba CB35) runs like a dream with Endeavour (arch flav) with i3 normally, but still performs well with other wms.
Yeah, way better. In the old days I was hesitant to update or even reboot for fear of the unknown… which was typically already known in a bunch of posts from a decade earlier. :)
There is some happy middle ground somewhere I think. Vulnerabilities can be discovered and exploited in older software, and new ones can be introduced, deliberately or otherwise, in newer builds. Adds a frisson of excitement to every update through npm, pypi, or wherever else.
Ubuntu->Mint-> GalliumOS and Fedora on 2 different machines-> NixOS(Laptop only)-> PopOS!(Desktop) ->NixOS (Desktop AND Laptop).
Mint is always gonna be the first immediate recommendation, I’m using NixOS because I wanted something different AND I could strip it to what I really need, since I ran it first with i3wm on the Chromebook that had GalliumOS on it.
Nowadays I use it because of Ephemeral Shells, atomicity and rollback.
I’m fighting against the immutable nature though, I don’t like immutable Distros but NixOS’ positives makes it more tolerable.
It’s not an OS I’d recommend but despite sucking at Nix syntax and getting it to do what I want, I’m feeling the most comfortable using it than other OSes, barring LMDE perhaps but I would think of it as a fallback rather than my main distro.
I only touched Arch via SteamOS but that barely counts, same with CachyOS.
the only Linux computer i actually have these days is my VPS, which runs Debian Trixie. i'm liking it -- i might use testing if/when i go back. was always an arch user for the past ~8 years
teaearlgraycold | 11 hours ago
Debian. That’s it for everything (servers, Pis, desktops, laptops) with the one exception of Pop OS on my computer with a new Nvidia card that’s not well supported even by Debian testing. It feels like the least hassle possible. Great support from 3rd parties, very stable, no enshittification (like Ubuntu).
As far as I’m concerned the natural state of any computer is to run Debian. Anything else is an aberration.
Akir | 7 hours ago
Debian feels more today like Ubuntu did back in the days before snaps and heavy commercialization. It’s just straightforward and simple to use with common-sense defaults, and getting it to run with whatever DE you want is pretty simple to do.
ewintr | 6 hours ago
Same here. My only exception is the computer that acts as my personal LLM inference server and has an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 platform, which runs Fedora because running the latest of the latest in apps and libraries really makes a difference there. Each time I log in, I feel like I am on another planet. It is not bad or anything, it just all feels so foreign.
chili-man | 11 hours ago
For my main computer, my misgivings with Debian are crusty old packages. Bad enough I deal with those at work. Is this true, or just common misconception?
I have my "server" (strong word for it) set up with Ubuntu Server, which I don't love for the same reason as you said. Very tempted to swap to Debian at some point, don't care much about bleeding edge features there (most containers anyways...).
teaearlgraycold | 11 hours ago
You can use Debian testing to improve that matter. It’s probably not very different than a recent Ubuntu. I use stable but I don’t do anything too fancy and will reach for a backport if there’s ever any issues.
goose | 40 minutes ago
The packages are generally older, yes, however:
Between those two, everything I need to be modern, is.
Barney | 3 hours ago
I'm running Bluefin, an atomic distro based on fedora silverblue. The overwhelming majority of my apps are flatpaks, and those that aren't or the ones that I compile myself are running in a Debian container, so I'm kind of running Debian too? :D
I completely agree with you. Debian is awesome.
[OP] kfwyre | 11 hours ago
Have you made the move to COSMIC on your Pop!_OS installation? I'm curious as to what your thoughts are if you have.
teaearlgraycold | 11 hours ago
The computer is running Cosmic. No complaints. I don’t really fuss about with my DE or WM anymore.
Nemoder | 3 hours ago
I setup a family PC that is used for media/gaming with Pop!+Cosmic+Wayland and it's been quite good. Way less headaches than Gnome used to have.
Kerry56 | 11 hours ago
I use Linux Mint, and have for about nine years. It was originally an easy transition from the Windows world, and I've found that it does everything I need.
On the rare occasions I've run into an issue, there is a lot of help available for this operating system and the Linux Mint forums have been welcoming for those of us who aren't technically proficient.
smores | 11 hours ago
I use Fedora with Gnome. I like Fedora, I don't really like Ubuntu, I use my laptop for both software development and recreation so I generally like it to Just Work™, which Fedora usually gives me!
arqalite | 3 hours ago
Same here; my only gripe with Fedora is that the audio enthusiast ecosystem is very scattered across COPRs and getting a full music production environment needs a lot of setup and tinkering.
I ended up setting up Ubuntu in a Distrobox and just exporting shortcuts to everything I need, seems to work fine.
timo | 40 minutes ago
What setup are you using?
arqalite | 16 minutes ago
Currently on Bitwig, bridging my non-native VSTs with Yabridge, but mostly using Vital and the built-in plugins. Interface is just a DacMagic XS and a pair of Audio Technica ATH-M20X headphones.
I'm trying to keep it simple and only install what I need (although I already failed on the samples part, my Downloads folder is full of sample pack archives I will probably never fully triage).
kacey | 6 hours ago
NixOS! (and I'm excited to see there may be one or even two more of us in all of Tildes)
It became infinitely easier to work with once LLMs got the point that they could write derivations and flakes for me, but I would still recommend this to nearly no one, and will install it on every computer I own forever 😅
bme | 3 hours ago
Curious about the LLM aspect of it. I probably am on slightly deeper than most to nixos (commercial codebase, hundreds of instances 10s of kloc supporting nix code). I got my start with the project documentation ~ 3 years ago via the nix pills guide + nixpkgs manual. It seemed really comprehensive at the time and since then we got nix.dev which basically seems to answer 90% of the questions I see on the subreddit complaining about the docs.
I think i'm firmly in the minority of people that think that the docs are any good. Do you ever use them or is it LLM all the way?
Feel free to ignore, I'm just being nosey. NixOS 4 lyfe gang sign.
chili-man | 11 hours ago
Fedora + KDE. It's a good blend of easy to use and new packages (which I care about for a few things I do). Haven't had many issues with it, so I haven't really looked into swapping. I like KDE pretty well, but also used GNOME for a long time and liked it fine.
I have used Ubuntu, Manjaro and Arch in the past. I didn't like snaps (felt slow, maybe I'm wrong) so Ubuntu's insistence pushed me away from it. Manjaro was OK, but it also just felt like secondhand Arch, so I moved to the real deal. Arch I was very happy with, until I had to set up a new computer and thought "no, I don't want to do all the setup again" (this was before archinstall script, that might have changed my mind). But Arch + i3 served me very well, while I was using it.
The only remotely tempting thing I see is Arch-like + dw{m, l}. I like that you can actually read the source, and I don't have to learn some new bespoke configuration to customize it (my main issue with i3; I wanted a tiling WM, but frankly have no patience for learning all the configs). I've set it up on an old laptop. I like it, but I'm not yet willing to put in the effort to customize and daily drive it.
Gummy | 11 hours ago
Kubuntu 25. I tried a lot of distros over the last couple years and every one had some weird pain points in what i wanted to do or stuff would take more time to setup than what felt worth it. Pop_OS and Mint were two I tried most recently since this is a gaming machine and those get recommended as "just works" for games, bur neither one was doing it for me. I ended up downloading Kubuntu just because I wanted to try KDE 6. I've run Debian on my home server for a decade so I'll always be biased towards anything built on it. I ended up loving the new plasma desktop in Kubuntu and it has been the easiest distro to just play games on. One command to install the nvidia drivers and pretty much everything just works.
Related, does anyone know why there is so much vitriol towards Ubuntu users in certain communities? I've pretty much never paid attention to linux discussions online. It's crazy how frequently I've asked about stuff in different discords and people suddenly don't want to help if i mention I'm using a Ubuntu distro.
0x29A | 11 hours ago
Some people harbor some ill will towards Canonical for the way they've handled a number of things, or ideas that some Linux users don't like that Canonical has tried to make into a thing (snaps, for instance), and I consider myself in that camp (I disabled snaps and dislike some stuff), even as a user of Kubuntu currently. However, whether I used it or not, I'd never turn that ire towards any users and would always be glad to help when people ask.
The Linux community (as with any, but they are quite vocal in Linux) still has its subset of assholes that judge anyone that doesn't use Arch, or whatever. There are a lot of nice people too. But there's certainly an arrogant subset that acts in a very particular elitist way and Canonical and users of its products probably become an easy target for that gross behavior to aim at. They view what they use as superior and balk at the idea of helping someone that uses something "inferior". Lots of overlap with the reply-guy and "just use <thing>" crowd too
Gummy | 11 hours ago
I suppose that makes sense. I am also in the camp of hating snap, but I've ignored it for so long I sorta forgot that its the default for a lot of Ubuntu stuff now. I'll take useless package manager I can ignore over a lot of the other issues I've ran into with Linux lol
vord | 11 hours ago
Dang, that thread predated me ragequitting Windows in 2019. I used OpenSUSE Tumbleweed pretty extensively then until about 2022, when I formatted EndeavorOS as an experiment because I was sick of fighting Discord. Haven't switched back, it works well enough that I've been too lazy to pave over again.
Gave up on using fun distros on my Raspberry Pis, went back to boring Raspbian. It works 100% (tho I now get this weird thing with the ethernet port stopping working randomly, I suspect a hardware issue).
I really want to get roaming home directories going across the 4ish machines in regular use so that each person can customize the bejesus out of their desktop and not be tied to a single machine. But I really don't have time to futz with it at the moment so will probably just keep assigned machines with the kids sharing.
My wife gave Zorin a spin, but we were both irked by their rebranding of many things...which is great for a unified brand for newbies but is *really" confusing after the 4th conversation along the lines of "You can use KDE Connect to control the TV now" followed up with "What's KDE Connect? Is it like Zorin Connect?"
OpenSUSE is like the weird cousin that everyone ignores in the corner, but felt more refined than most other distros once you got the initial codec issues sorted out. Partially because their default is to install all the optional dependencies, so stuff tended to have less "why is that not working." Zypper is hands down one of the best package managers out there.
macleod | 9 hours ago
vord | 8 hours ago
opi is the great provider yes.
pra | 11 hours ago
Fedora Bazzite, their "Kinoite" KDE variant.
I don't love Redhat as much as I once did, but it's well-maintained and I can goof off playing almost any games (that don't require DRM I was going to hate in principle anyway) without having to think very hard.
Akir | 7 hours ago
Is Bazzite an official Fedora project? I thought it was just built on top of their immutable distro foundation.
macleod | 7 hours ago
It's not an official Fedora project, it's a derivative of Universal Blue for gaming, which in itself is a derivative of Fedora Atomic, which is an official derivative of Fedora, but the original Universal Blue images were a derivative of Fedora Silverblue (which was Fedora CoreOS for servers with a Gnome desktop environment added), which created Fedora Kinoite as a derivative replacing Gnome with KDE.
It's all wibbly wobbly balls of stuff and turtles all the way down.
archevel | 6 hours ago
I am running Nixos on my work laptop. I like the convenience of just setting up a nix-shell with the necessary dependencies when I tinker with something. It's running hyperland which feels fairly slick. For my home computer I recently just installed Debian. It is just solid. I figured that if I needed to run some software that wasn't in the regular repo I could just as well either run it in a container or flatpak OR just build it from source.
goose | 11 hours ago
Started out on Ubuntu back in 2007, wanted the GUI for an old laptop. Switched to Debian somewhere around 2012, and haven't looked back. Are some of the packages old as fuck? Yes. But it's also bedrock stable, I think my longest uptime was just over 4 years before I finally updated that kernel. And I know how to use it. I tried Gentoo, Arch, and Pop over the years just to experiment. But Debian forever has me in its clutches, and I'm happy to be in them.
zoroa | 11 hours ago
Fedora with Sway.
I really like Sway. I really dislike that I basically have to build a DE around it. Really wish that something like "Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager" gets popular so I can just swap my preferred WM into an existing DE.
Prodiggles | 11 hours ago
Pop_OS! 24.04 with KDE. I had worked with COSMIC for a bit, but found some features still missing from the configuration that was causing scaling issues with my monitor setup (2K and 4K). Mainly around optimizing for gaming seemed to favor KDE or GNOME, so I tried KDE first and was happy with it.
ix-ix | 11 hours ago
Archlinux since like 2010! Mainly I like to be able to control everything about my OS and understand it deeply. I use it for my main laptop and my home server.
unkz | 11 hours ago
All servers run Debian, except firewalls which run OpeBSD, and desktops run Ubuntu which is of course Debian on the inside. I guess I do a lot of embedded stuff on Raspberry Pi OS, which is based on Debian again.
I used to on Slackware back in the day but I’m not about that life anymore.
WrathOfTheHydra | 8 hours ago
Arch Linux gang! Sitting pretty firmly in the KDE/Wayland camp since Wayland's become a lot more stable. Planning on playing with some smaller distros at some point on a couple low-spec systems I have around.
coyotes | 3 hours ago
Void and Alma
Void feels like FreeBSD but syntax is a bit easier. Super clean OS I’m sure classic Debian fans will like and no systemd. Comes in musl or glibc
kari | 11 hours ago
I use Gentoo because portage is the best package manager I’ve ever used
0x29A | 11 hours ago
Currently main PC is running Kubuntu 24.04 LTS with Cinnamon instead of KDE. Mostly just because I chose it a long time ago, it worked well enough, and now that I've had enough inertia of using it on my main PC for this long, it's going to be annoying to switch if I decide to do so at some point. I am thinking about trying AwesomeWM on it tho
Couple of other machines I have (laptop, low-power living room TV pc) are running MX Linux. I like their way of doing things, their built-in MX tools, and I'm at the point where I think I prefer XFCE as a DE. At some point I might go MX on my main PC too.
I run an OPNSense DIY router, an Unraid server, and a DietPi (very lightweight Debian running on an old Dell micro PC) print server.
I have another "test" machine that I'm currently trying out CachyOS on also
I do still have one Win10 box around and that's simply for music production because there are a lot of annoyances/caveats/etc for my particular setup that makes me avoid Linux for that purpose for now
Pistos | 11 hours ago
Gentoo, because:
USEflags let me put less stuff on my system, avoiding things I don't want or need (some dependencies, "features"), instead of apps having every possible feature compiled into themFor installations on other people's laptops that I don't want to have to maintain too much, I've turned to KDE Neon, which users can relatively easily update themselves.
wervenyt | 9 hours ago
As of late, I've been running NixOS and Guix System with nongnu packages. The immense learning curve can't be overlooked, but once I got the model down, the strategies for long term maintenance of a system that doesn't match the project leader's vision on other distros became blatantly ridiculous. Sure, oftentimes getting my desired behavior requires shooting blindly in the dark, and I definitely don't use the full capacity of these systems, but I'm setting up an HTPC and haven't felt this optimistic about getting underdocumented daemons upright in a while.
macleod | 9 hours ago
Are you running them together, or are you running two different systems? I have been tempted to switch from NixOS, because even after five years, the configuration language, the home manager vs none vs flakes is driving me up a wall. I don't think anyone can deny that the Nix language is abysmal, and the Guix scheme config looks so clean and well documented.
How is setting up packages that do not exist in the registry? With Nix it's such a pain.
GOTO10 | 5 hours ago
I find nixos to be very painful, but everything else in that space (Ansible, &c) so much more painful. So nixos it is.
AI is very good at writing nix modules en doing refactors, as long as you know what needs to happen on a high level.
wervenyt | 5 hours ago
Definitely different systems, though supposedly guix-on-nixos is quite alright(? I don't buy it). I have one system with systemwide home-manager and one with userlevel home-manager, after waiting for a few years for flakes to mature, and installed the Guix system a month or two ago. I haven't been as adventurous with Guix, so unfortunately I haven't had to build my own packages yet, but it does seem similar to Nix's process, speaking based only on docs and hearsay.
JCPhoenix | 8 hours ago
I'm basic, so I always just use Ubuntu. Though even at work, it seems like everything is Ubuntu. Personally, it works for my purposes, so I stick with it.
Though I wouldn't mind trying like Pop_OS or Bazzite. I got a laptop or two I could toss em on.
Chiasmic | 7 hours ago
Has anyone tried/got thoughts on Omarchy? I have heard good things but not pulled the trigger myself.
hpr | 2 hours ago
The technical side looked promising, though I have heard mostly negative things about the projects creator nowadays.
Not sure if this is derailing, but I have a pretty similar result in my setup that I cobbled together without too much fuss from Fedora with Niri and DankMaterialShell.
I'm very impressed with how DMS is getting along as a "Desktop Environment for people who don't want a Desktop Environment".
The same setup should also be easy to setup with Arch or Nix instead of Fedora.
plutonic | 7 hours ago
Mint. It just works, no bullshit. I run a very lean desktop setup, mainly just a browser/video/music player, no gaming. I come from a Windows world, but always on the NT side of things (NT-2000-7-Mint) I ran windows 7 until way past the bitter end. At that point it was either go to Linux or Windows 10 and I just couldn't do it. Linux Mint it was. I don't want to have to mess around with stuff, I just want it to work and Mint for 3 years now has done that.
rabbidearz | 6 hours ago
Rockin Bluefin Linux. It's Fedora with Gnome but immutable so it just works and stays working. With other distros I was running into issues with nvidia drivers and my Samsung g9 49 inch monitor (it's a problem child).
Bluefin is beautiful and functional. I have Forge tiling manager on there as well.
I'm running origami linux with cosmic de on a laptop and it's also great
lostwax | 5 hours ago
Alpine. It's a fairly recent move to there from debian and I'm very much liking the straightforward nature of things, the speed and not having to deal with systemd. For a desktop it's reasonably austere behind the scenes but I have it and kde running on a couple of boxes, including an old surface pro, and it just works.
Debian felt the same when I moved to it sometime around 1999-2000. It doesn't anymore.
The start was red hat 5.2 in 1998 or so but I can't say I stayed there long.
Fwiw my professional life looks more like carpentry than tech.
foryth | 5 hours ago
Nobara which i guess is fedora with glorious eggroll's nvidia drivers and the gaming apps already installed
Fizz_Cashman | an hour ago
How is nobara working out for you? I had been using nobara for a few years (also with a Nvidia card) and I started experiencing more and more issues which pushes me to look into other distros.
I was pleasantly surprised with my move to bazzite, all the points of friction I experienced with nobara simply no longer existed.
At the end of the day my gaming time has become so limited that I'm basically only using my steam deck at this point, which runs on steamos.
SloMoMonday | 3 hours ago
Been using Arch all round since 2021 and recently jumped to CachyOS on my gaming PC.
Enjoyed all the customizing and fiddling at first but lately there's no major issues and I don't even have to open the terminal much besides a package install or update.
And not the biggest fan of KDE but its the easiest if other people need to use that pc.
For my workstation is either MATE or xfce.
lou | an hour ago
I got Kubuntu on my desktop right now because my Windows 10 broke in a way that I'm not wiling to fix. KDE Plasma is the desktop environment that just works and has everything so I could go on with my activities without interruption.
KDE Plasma is so impressive. It is not nearly as popular as it should.
Loopdriver | 49 minutes ago
Fedora with gnome.... I like it so much I shoehorned into my son's laptop as well.
It works flawlessly, it's fast and easy to use.
I used Debian for an year before fedora and I kind of liked it but while I understood it was super stable (and I was for real) I needed something slightly more up to date :)
sparkle | 7 hours ago
Arch, of course, though my lineage dates back to Mandrake Linux and then a long stint on old Ubuntu with some Windows side quests along the way. Been running Arch in some fashion since 2016 but only recently started to daily drive it. Oh I also successfully booted Linux From Scratch and then never touched it again.
I like Arch just because it really works well for me. I've built up a knowledge base of common problems I've faced and solutions but I rarely have to touch it lately because things just... work. I've got btrfs and snapper set up so that does give me some ease of mind as well. It's also got a lot of inertia, most commands are muscle memory at this point and I've got about a 95% confidence that if something breaks, I can fairly quickly identify the issue and fix it or workaround it. And I also just like problem solving too, I think I'd be bored with an OS that I didn't have to tinker with.
I primarily use Debian or Alpine for all my servers though. Debian is just really nice and stable for the most part and is like a good Clydesdale. Alpine is tiny and great for SBC projects or anything lightweight - I have a couple containers running Alpine as a base. A surprising amount of power in such a little distro.
Bwerf | 5 hours ago
Right now only regular Ubuntu on server and desktop. It's mostly worked very well. I don't tinker too much and "just wants things to work", and Ubuntu has worked very good for me there.
Eric_the_Cerise | 4 hours ago
First of all ... Debian on all the servers. 'Cuz, duh.
I run Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) on my laptops and workstations. It is Linux Mint w/o the underlying Ubuntu BS and bloat.
This has been my primary OS for 3-4 years now. Prior to that, I mostly ran PopOS, which I did and still do like, mostly, but had a few semi-catastrophic failures on it that have made me gun-shy, and since I switched to LMDE, I like it even better.
PS: If anyone on the Mint team sees this, I'd be all in favor of Mint switching to LMDE as their flagship version...
stewedrabbit | 3 hours ago
I was about to say I use Debian for everything except my main computer that runs Arch (only because the tinkering is part of the fun I look for when using my PC), but then I realised that that is as far from the truth as possible:
() I'd really like to find a graphical web browser that can also run on that laptop, but so far no such luck. If anyone has any ideas, shoot!
zatamzzar | an hour ago
I usually use Pop! OS and Debian and NetBSD(I know, not Linux), but from time to time I've used Raspbian, Parrotsec, Alpine and Kali for various dedicated purposes.
Chemslayer | an hour ago
SteamOS, because it comes pre-installed on the Steam Deck :P
In actuality though, I do use it as my daily driver, for games obviously but also everything else using a dock and desktop mode. I did dual boot Linux (Ubuntu I think) several years back when I was flirting with being a programmer, but this is my first real experience with Linux full-time. It's been great, I do love the Discover store as a convenient way to install most things. The decks immutable OS makes installing non-Discover apps a pain sometimes, but nothing too bad. Overall very happy, runs well, and glad to not have to worry about what crappy thing Microsoft will do next
Areldyb | 58 minutes ago
Let's see, uh...
Mint is my go-to for new installs, because it Just Works so well. Two computers in the house are on it right now. One of them is the living room gaming/media PC, which ran Pop!_OS for a little while but I found the experience to be pretty flaky.
My laptop used to also run Mint, but I switched to Kubuntu at some point. I forget why I did, but Plasma's so nice I've kept it anyway. That one's also got a Kali VM because everything I use ends up with one of those eventually.
The kids' laptop (the one that isn't running ChromeOS) runs... I forget what I put on there actually, something lightweight that a decommissioned Chromebook could live with. I should look into that.
The Pis all run Raspberry Pi OS.
My wife's all Apple products. She'll see the light someday.
At this point, the only computer in my house still on Windows is my work laptop, and that's only because it isn't mine.
timo | 37 minutes ago
Bazzite, based on Fedora. It’s extremely stable, updates are very easy and you can always roll back. Gaming works great. Using Gnome since it gets out of my way, which is nice.
tomf | 5 hours ago
all of my servers are on either Ubuntu server or Debian. My super shitty Chromebook (Toshiba CB35) runs like a dream with Endeavour (arch flav) with i3 normally, but still performs well with other wms.
trim | 4 hours ago
I agree with using Debian on a server. The lack of bleeding edge packages matters less. Stability more.
tomf | 4 hours ago
Yeah, way better. In the old days I was hesitant to update or even reboot for fear of the unknown… which was typically already known in a bunch of posts from a decade earlier. :)
trim | 3 hours ago
These days with sneaky supply side attacks, updating could be worse than not. It's an increasingly complex situation
tomf | 3 hours ago
So me not updating or restarting my SF01 for three years was leet opsec — got it! :)
trim | 2 hours ago
There is some happy middle ground somewhere I think. Vulnerabilities can be discovered and exploited in older software, and new ones can be introduced, deliberately or otherwise, in newer builds. Adds a frisson of excitement to every update through npm, pypi, or wherever else.
Nihilego | 4 hours ago
My Linux Journey was
Ubuntu->Mint-> GalliumOS and Fedora on 2 different machines-> NixOS(Laptop only)-> PopOS!(Desktop) ->NixOS (Desktop AND Laptop).
Mint is always gonna be the first immediate recommendation, I’m using NixOS because I wanted something different AND I could strip it to what I really need, since I ran it first with i3wm on the Chromebook that had GalliumOS on it.
Nowadays I use it because of Ephemeral Shells, atomicity and rollback.
I’m fighting against the immutable nature though, I don’t like immutable Distros but NixOS’ positives makes it more tolerable.
It’s not an OS I’d recommend but despite sucking at Nix syntax and getting it to do what I want, I’m feeling the most comfortable using it than other OSes, barring LMDE perhaps but I would think of it as a fallback rather than my main distro.
I only touched Arch via SteamOS but that barely counts, same with CachyOS.
trim | 4 hours ago
I might have said Endeavour OS a little while back, and I still have that on a couple of things. It's Arch derived, with added friendly.
More recently though, I've been using Open SUSE Tumbleweed.
bellewinn | 4 hours ago
the only Linux computer i actually have these days is my VPS, which runs Debian Trixie. i'm liking it -- i might use testing if/when i go back. was always an arch user for the past ~8 years